The company, which is known for providing low-cost constant backups for its subscribers, is also known for building its cloud out of a whole lot of teeny (well, 3 TB) commodity disk drives rather than a few great big ones.  This saves money and helps the company grow more granularly.

The only problem is if you suddenly run out of teeny commodity disk drives — or find that, in a matter of two weeks, that they’ve tripled in price, as BackBlaze did, when it was adding 50 TB of capacity a day. At the same time, the company wasn’t buying enough to be able to get deals from the manufacturers.

In an extremely detailed, hysterically funny blog post, the company is now relating how it dealt with the crisis — basically, by buying them as consumer commodities rather than as parts, and turning them into the parts they needed to build the “storage pods” on which their service was based.

“With our normal channels charging usury prices for the hard drives core to our business, we needed a miracle,” writes Andrew Klein, director of product marketing. “We got two: Costco and Best Buy. On Brian [Wilson, CTO]’s whiteboard he listed every Costco and Best Buy in the San Francisco Bay Area and then some. We would go to each location and buy as many 3 TB drives as possible.”

While the company then had to “shuck” the drives from their cases, this saved the company $100 per drive over buying them from its usual suppliers. Problem solved.

For a while.

“The “Two Drive Limit” signs started appearing in retail stores in mid-November,” Klein writes. “At first we didn’t believe them, but we quickly learned otherwise.” So workers started making the circuit – circled the San Francisco Bay hitting local Costco and Best Buy stores: 10 stores, 46 disk drives, for 212 miles. It put a lot of miles on the cars, and a lot of time, but it solved that problem.

For a while.

Then BackBlaze employees started getting banned from stores.

At that point, they started hitting up friends and family, and not just in the Bay Area, but nationwide. “It was cheaper to buy external drives at a store in Iowa and have Yev’s dad, Boris, ship them to California than it was to buy internal drives through our normal channels,” Klein writes.

(The company also apparently considered renting a moving van to drive across the country, hitting stores along the way — a variation on the “bandwidth of a station wagon of tapes” problem — but decided it wouldn’t be economical.)

By the time internal drive prices got to their normal level, the company had bought 5.5 petabytes of storage through retail channels — or more than 1800 disk drives. But finally, it could go back to its normal practices.

Mostly.

“On July 25th of this year, Backblaze took $5M in venture funding,” Klein writes. ”At the same time, Costco was offering 3TB external drives for $129 about $30 less than we could get for internal drives. The limit was five drives per person. Needless to say, it was a deal we couldn’t refuse.”

Disclosure: I am a BackBlaze customer.

Of course, the effect on the industry is minor compared to the effect on the Thai people themselves, where so far nearly 400 have died in what is said to be the worst flooding in 50 years. But as the worst of the flooding appears to be over, the country is beginning to examine the economic effects — which could end up being nearly as damaging as the economic unpleasantness a few years back, according to component research firm iSuppli:

“As a result of the flooding, the HDD industry in the fourth quarter will suffer its worst downturn in three years. HDD shipments in the fourth quarter will decline to 125 million units, down 27.7 percent from 173 million in the third quarter, as presented in the figure attached. The drop is the largest sequential decrease on a percentage basis since the fourth quarter of 2008 when shipments fell 21.2 percent during the worst point of the last electronics downturn. IHS estimates that 30 percent of HDD production in the fourth quarter this year will be lost because of the disaster. This will result in a significant shortage of HDDs. Because of the shortage, HDD inventories will be depleted and will cause average HDD pricing to rise by 10 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the third.”

Thailand is the world’s second-largest provider of hard disk drives, after China, and has manufacturing facilities for Western Digital and Toshiba, iSuppli goes on to say. And while Seagate has an operating plant in the area, it may face a shortage of parts, according to Reuters.

In fact, the effects are likely to be so devastating that they will change Western Digital’s status in disk drive manufacturing, iSuppli says. “Western Digital is likely to lose its status as the world’s largest shipper of HDDs, with its rank expected to fall two positions to third in the fourth quarter, down from first place in the third quarter. Toshiba’s rank could fall to fourth place, down from fifth.”

Slowdowns are particularly likely to occur in notebook PCs in the first quarter of next year, iSuppli said, because some components are stockpiled and the market will likely adjust to use different sources by the second quarter. Several notebook providers, including Compai, said their quarterly earnings might be lower as a result of lower shipments due to the lack of disk drives. (Though, if the Japanese flash storage manufacturers recover, perhaps this will push a faster-than-expected switch to flash storage in notebooks?)

Part of the blame goes to increasingly tight “just in time” manufacturing supply chains, where parts are shipped essentially as they’re needed rather than being warehoused, Reuters noted.

Iain Bowles of ProBrand had even more dire predictions, of price increases of up to 25 percent. In fact, shortages from the Thai natural disaster could be worse than the Japan earthquake because stockpiles are smaller, he said. Moreover, he believes it could extend into the second quarter of next year as well, and that the recovery is likely to be slower than in Japan.